As he tours Sandy devastation with Chris Christie, swing state polls break for the president

By Joan Walsh

President Obama is greeted by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie upon his arrival in Atlantic City on Wednesday. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Weirdly, Mitt Romney was counting on a “wave” of anti-Obama voters to carry him to victory Nov. 6. But the waves have all gone President Obama’s way, and I’m not making a tasteless Sandy joke. With reliable polls in Ohio and Wisconsin Wednesday showing Obama with solid leads there, Romney has almost no path to victory on Tuesday. Polls today also showed him holding smaller leads in the swing states of Virginia, Florida and Nevada, and tied in North Carolina.

It’s still theoretically possible that lingering post-Sandy problems – and they will be massive – could sour voters’ moods or hamper turnout on Tuesday. This race is still tight. But Romney’s inability to close the deal after his Oct. 3 debate surge is looking permanent.

White working class voters in both Ohio and Wisconsin are key to Obama’s strength there, according to the latest polls. That’s why Romney has gone up with more dishonest ads, both about the auto restructuring and welfare. His campaign turned to the welfare lie in August, claiming Obama had “gutted” the program’s work requirements, as polls showed Romney having trouble sealing the deal with working class whites. Campaign advisors told the New York Times anonymously that Romney was going to focus on “cultural” issues – read racial issues – to court those white voters. Romney and Paul Ryan stepped away from the welfare lies after everyone from Bill Clinton to Newt Gingrich said there was no evidence for the claim. But there it is again, in ads going up in Ohio, Wisconsin, Colorado and Florida, as Romney tries to tap into traditional white taxpayer association between welfare and minorities.

Romney’s lies about the auto industry are arguably more brazen and baseless, and they’ve drawn unprecedented rebukes from officials at GM and Chrysler. But so far they’re not working either. Even as worried Ohio Chrysler employees sought reassurance that they’d keep their jobs, polls were showing that Ohio voters believe Obama cares more about them than Romney does. Almost half of white working class voters believe the economy is getting better, which helps account for why Obama is tied among those voters while he trails by up to 30 points with the same demographic in Florida and Virginia, according to the New York Times.

Watching Fox News all afternoon, on the day after Sandy made its devastating landfall along the Eastern seaboard, was like entering an alternate dimension — but not the one you’re thinking. No, this was the dimension where the unfocused anger, the slow-boiling subsurface paranoia that drives so much of the coverage on Roger Ailes’ news network, has miraculously drained away. Fox on Tuesday afternoon was not just a real news network as well as a genuinely “fair and balanced” one — it was actually a pretty doggone decent one.

One of the info-nuggets revealed in the bright yellow crawl across the bottom of the screen, sometime around 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, read like this: ROMNEY CAMPAIGN TOLD TO RAMP DOWN CRITICISM OF PRESIDENT OBAMA. Whether for moral reasons or purely tactical ones, that decision had apparently spread, top-down, throughout the Fox News operation. If the discomfort and difficulty of this undertaking was palpable at times, there are quite a few people, even at Fox, who are trained in actual journalism and can pull it off for short periods. So what we saw across Megyn Kelly, Shep Smith and Neal Cavuto’s successive afternoon shows was largely straightforward reporting on the damage in New York City and along the New Jersey shore, most of it handled with aplomb.

Veteran Fox reporter Rick Leventhal, better known for jingoistic flak-jacket stand-ups from Iraq or Afghanistan, trudged through the sand-choked streets of Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., describing the terrifying night he had spent there as the town flooded. Another reporter whose name I didn’t catch successfully intercepted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo coming out of a limousine in lower Manhattan, just outside the entrance to the flooded Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. It was a cordial and entirely professional interview, even if Cuomo ducked the question — of great interest to me and several million other people — of when New York’s subways might reopen, and how much. (Partially, he said, and “over the coming days.”)

Only here and there did the bizarre, unbalanced combination of rage and illness that customarily animates Fox News and its audience poke through – and I’m mostly talking about the commercials. Dubious-sounding law firms from Waco, Texas, urging you to sue someone about your hip replacement; one-time “Knots Landing” star William Devane, piloting his private plane in a painfully awkward pitch for a gold brokerage (always the grumpy-Gus investment of choice); a stick-on portable light bulb – which you can see for yourself at InstaBulb.com — getting the hard sell from some cheerful voice-over Australian. Basically, you can use the InstaBulb to illuminate your secret trove of gold bullion in the closet – but it’s so damn hard to get in and out of there after that botched hip replacement!

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, usually the favorite whipping boy of politicians during disasters, is basking in unaccustomed glory.

FEMA, ridiculed after Hurricane Katrina and the subject of proposed budget cuts after the financial crisis, is being praised by governors and mayors from storm-ravished states along the East Coast.

"I have to say, the administration, the president himself and FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate have been outstanding with us so far," said Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on "Good Morning America" Tuesday. "He worked

Mitt Romney, who said earlier this year that the states should have more responsibility for responding to natural disasters and suggested that sending disaster relief to the private sector would be "even better," would not answer repeated questions from reporters Tuesday about whether he would cut funding to FEMA.

Paul Ryan singled out FEMA's funding in his 2011 proposed budget, which was passed in the House but not the Senate. Ryan recommended a 40 percent cut in the budget for programs including FEMA, citing the record number of disasters declared during the Obama administration.

Brit Hume is claiming that the federal government isn’t helping with relief because D.C. government employees went home early in advance of the hurricane, and John Podhoretz says the federal government will have no role whatsoever in cleanup, which is obviously completely untrue. He then deleted that tweet and said instead that the feds will help but “will not lead” and also certain parts of the government don’t count as “big government.” (The parts that do good things don’t count, obviously.)

Meanwhile, at the Corner! Greg Pollowitz puts up a one-sentence-long post that somehow contains two glaring inaccuracies. It is not a photo of Marines defending the Tomb of the Unknowns during Hurricane Sandy, it is a photo of the Army, and it was taken in September, during a regular rainstorm.

And Jonah Goldberg is preemptively mad about so-far hypothetical and very unlikely plans to maybe delay Election Day, on account of residents of multiple states possibly being unable to vote because of the horrible storm that incapacitated much of New York and New Jersey.

And Mitt Romney is still pointlessly collecting canned goods that the Red Cross doesn’t want — goods that are in Ohio, not New York or New Jersey, where the hurricane was — and claiming his rallies are “relief events.” (Just write a big check to the Red Cross, admit you don’t have the power or authority to do anything else, and get on with campaigning, Mitt. Christ.)

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Three former Democratic presidential candidates paid personal respects Friday to former Sen. George McGovern, whose 1972 campaign for president galvanized the party's liberal wing and ushered in a new generation of political activism.

Walter Mondale, John Kerry and Gary Hart — who like McGovern all spent time in the Senate before unsuccessful runs for the White House — led a crowd of hundreds of mourners at McGovern's funeral. McGovern died Sunday after a brief stay in hospice care. He was 90.

In a sign of McGovern's stature in sparsely populated South Dakota, the service aired live on television in the state's largest city. It served as a final farewell to South Dakota's native son. A private burial for McGovern in Washington will be scheduled later.

Vice President Joe Biden spoke at a prayer service Thursday night. The dignitary list for Friday included Mondale, a former vice president who was the Democratic nominee in the 1984 presidential race that marked McGovern's last bid for public office. Kerry, a Massachusetts senator and the 2004 Democratic nominee, made the trip on short notice.

I came upon this video which I discovered gets thousands and thousands of hits every single day.

This video was an intentional distortion of things then Sen. Obama said when he was the keynote speaker at the "Call to Renewal" Conference" in Washington, D.C. in 2006 lead by the progressive-Evangelical organization - Sojourners and the Rev. Jim Wallis

This is Obama's actual 40 minute speech he delivered as the keynote speaker where this words were extracted:

Given that there are thousand of viewing of this video every single day - I think it is worthwhile to ask progressive spiritually Christians and other progressive spiritually minded people to consider posting some comments. Don't allow the religious right to define people of faith.

The real George McGovern was nothing like the cartoon character of his conservative critics. Although McGovern wasn't the only man to seek the Oval Office with an exemplary military career, his record of war bravery was remarkable. In World War II, he flew dozens of missions over Austria, Germany and Italy and won the Distinguished Flying Cross after his plane was shot down over Czechoslovakia. His experiences in war inspired him to become a man of peace -- just as his experience growing up among dirt-poor farmers in the Great Depression inspired him to fight poverty and hunger.

It's hard to believe that 40 years ago, there was a candidate for president who supported a guaranteed national income for all Americans, national health care and legislation for clean air and clear water, but what's even more remarkable was that he was McGovern's opponent, the "conservative" incumbent Republican Richard Nixon. Which goes to show just how far to the extreme right the playing field has tilted. To be sure, McGovern supported all those things too, and, yes, his platform was certainly the most progressive of any major presidential candidate in my lifetime. He was also remarkably naive during his 1972 campaign of the extent that social unrest and programs ike school busing for racial integration were driving blue-collar whites out of the Democratic Party.

So with McGovern in mind, let's be as honest as possible: The 2012 campaign is a disgrace to his legacy and to all the things he believed in. McGovern's era was a time when fighting poverty was seen as an American crisis, an essential mission not just of "the government" but of a society that aspired to world leadership. It's shocking that in just four decades we've gone from that fundamental sense of decency and fairness to see the poor as a greedy entitled class with its hand out --to the extent that we talk about poverty at all.

But frankly, neither candidate in 2012 meets the McGovern standard for candor when it comes to Afghanistan -- both President Obama and Mitt Romney would rather run out the clock than explain why we're still there after 11 years. In 1972, McGovern called for a fair tax code that didn't reward millionaires, and yet that situation has gotten progressively (no pun intended) worse.

Forty years ago this summer, George McGovern urged America: "From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick -- come home, America. Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward." It is for that refrain that his speech is still remembered: "Come home, America."